According to Linux Kernel Patch statistics, Free Electrons contributed 111 patches to this release, making it the 24th contributing company by number of commits: a somewhat lower than usual contribution level from our side. At least, Free Electrons cannot be blamed for trying to push more code into 4.14 because of its Long Term Support nature! 🙂

The main highlights of our contributions are:

On the RTC subsystem, Alexandre Belloni made as usual a number of fixes and improvements to various drivers, especially the ds1307 driver.

On the NAND subsystem, Boris Brezillon did a number of small improvements in various areas.

On the support for Marvell platforms

Antoine Ténart improved the ppv2 network driver used by the Marvell Armada 7K/8K SoCs: support for 10G speed and TSO support are the main highlights. In order to support 10G speed, Antoine added a driver in drivers/phy/ to configure the common PHYs in the Armada 7K/8K SoCs.

Thomas Petazzoni also improved the ppv2 network driver by adding support for TX interrupts and per-CPU RX interrupts.

Grégory Clement contributed some patches to enable NAND support on Armada 7K/8K, as well as a number of fixes in different areas (GPIO fix, clock handling fixes, etc.)

Maxime Ripard contributed the support for a new board, the BananaPI M2-Magic. Maxime also contributed a few fixes to the Allwinner DRM driver, and a few other misc fixes (clock, MMC, RTC, etc.).

Quentin Schulz contributed the support for the power button functionality of the AXP221 (PMIC used in several Allwinner platforms)

On the support for Atmel platforms, Quentin Schulz improved the clock drivers for this platform to properly support the Audio PLL, which allowed to fix the Atmel audio drivers. He also fixed suspend/resume support in the Atmel MMC driver to support the deep sleep mode of the SAMA5D2 processor.

In addition to making direct contributions, Free Electrons is also involved in the Linux kernel development by having a number of its engineers act as Linux kernel maintainers. As part of this effort, Free Electrons engineers have reviewed, merged and sent pull requests for a large number of contributions from other developers: